I was playing around with massaging my 23andme me DNA match data at lunch, and always find it interesting how far flung we all end up. I have 1,053 matches in 23andme’s “Countries of Ancestry” tool (previously aka Ancestry Finder), which is populated with answers your DNA matches provided on the location their grandparents came from

Of the possible 4,212 grandparents, 1,508 locations were “Not Provided”, and 891 were listed as “United States.” The cousins range from 3rd to Distant.

My maternal grandparents both came from small towns near to each other in Czechoslovakia, my paternal grandmother came from County Offaly in Ireland, and my paternal great-grandparents also came over from Ireland. All ended up in New York City.

I can take the paper trail back to the early 1800s on most of my ancestral lines, so it is interesting to see various hotspots in some countries. Obviously, people travel, so my having one match with 4 grandparents from Iran, for example, doesn’t mean I have Iranian ancestry – someone in my line (or a descendant) could have traveled in that direction in the distant past.

But, I am left wondering with so many Russian, Ukranian, and Scandinavian grandparents listed – did someone head down to the Czech Republic from there, or the other way around. Vikings? (One can hope.) Hopefully one day I’ll find out!

In any case, the real reason for my post – below is a fun way to view these matches using Batchgeo mapping. I created a spreadsheet that counted up all the grandparent countries, then pasted the data into their page. After a few tweaks of the advanced settings – Voila! A map of the locations using color to indicate the grandparent counts by country.

Interestingly, when I mapped my wife’s matches in this way, I noticed that she has more matches with grandparents from Poland and Russia than she does the United States! Considering she has no known Polish ancestors at this point, and all of her emigrant ancestors are at great-grandparents and several beyond that, that is kind of interesting. (As I mentioned, I have 3 emigrant grandparents, and 2 emigrant great-grandparents, yet I have more US grandparents in my matches by far. ) Are her Ashkenazi matches from her Russian great-grandfather’s inherited DNA skewing the results?

I also am wondering if 23andme has published just how many people have been tested with listed ancestry from each country when looking at their entire database. If, say, many more people have been tested in Russia than in Croatia, is that large number of Russian grandparents in my matches’ results showing up because of the larger testing pool in that location, or via a true ancestral connection in my DNA? Hmm. To be continued, I suspect.

Finally, one thing I noticed with the BatchGeo mapping tool – the grouping of results by color is kind of skewed, and there is no way I see to change it. For example, the lowest color coded grouping is “1-3″ and my highest is “124-891″ – I would like to even out those groupings to make it more honest to the eye.

It is a nicely designed chart – although according to discussion on their forums and even my own results, the specificity seems to affected by the current size of the comparison data set.

My ancestry is 50% Irish and 50% Czech and I can name the exact towns where 6 out of 8 of my great-grandparents came from. My 99.6% reported European ancestry is purported to be in the “sweet spot” of their data – however my results have a fair amount of “Nonspecific” percentages. They also show what I think is probably noise in their analysis with tiny amounts of South Asian, Middle Eastern and North African in there as well.

With 23andme’s big push to reach a database of a million people, it will be interesting to see how this composition chart changes over time – assuming they update it regularly as new information becomes available. (Some other reference info on the site has not seemed to keep up with the times.)

Overall, I am quite happy with the service and hopefully I’ll find a match one day that will help me find where them long lost Tierneys came from back in Ireland.

I figured Microsoft Excel was the best common denominator to use for this process – there are any number of tools I could use to combine the files and work with them at the command line, but that would limit the number of people who could use it.

So, here’s the quick scoop: My Excel spreadsheet is designed for use with the .CSV data files you have already downloaded from 23andme’s Ancestry Finder. (Again, see my Ancestry Finder Download Tool post for more info on that process.)

It will import ALL .CSV data files in a selected folder

It will add a column with the name of the 23andme user the data file came from. (It uses the data file name for that, so don’t rename them after you download them!)

Then it will make you a sandwich. A nice juicy data sandwich.

Each data row will have the source person AND matching person’s name in it – otherwise you would have a list of a few hundred thousand matches without knowing whom they belonged to!

About the Author

As I have discovered more evidence of my family’s immigrations and documentation of their lives, I have become entranced by the idea that while we live in different times we often travel similar paths. Read More